kontrawize

USB, openSUSE 10.2, and VMware Server 1.0.1

Having updated my laptop to use openSUSE 10.2, I updated my deskside PC as well to use 10.2. Sadly, it crashed badly within a day of my doing so - not necessarily because of openSUSE 10.2, but perhaps the interaction with VMware Server and the two guest operating systems I was running (SUSE Linux 10.1 and Windows XP Pro). I just had to reformat the disk partitions and install openSUSE 10.2 from scratch (luckily my important stuff, like my VMware sessions, was recently backed up). I don't know what the source of these crashes is, but it's happened too often lately for me to be comfortable with it. However, there is no single obvious cause.

Running VMware under openSUSE 10.2, I tried to connect a Logitech USB webcam to the Windows XP guest, but found that VMware Server was not making any USB devices available to the guests. It turns out that this is a known issue, that USB devices aren't available to guest operating systems with VMware Server on openSUSE 10.2. This is because of a security change that was made in openSUSE 10.2.

It's not clear to me yet whether there is a working short term solution. The links above (and replies to them) suggest some ideas. I'll let you know if I find a solution that works.

XML is first class, scripting languages are second class, part 2

I just read Steven Lott's reply to my reponse to his post "XML - One Ring to Rule them All...". It's a pretty thoughtful reply.

The question was raised about what I meant when describing XML as "first class data", and scripting languages as "second class data". What I meant is that there are plenty of software tools for processing XML as data. I'm less convinced that most scripting languages are as easily parsed as data (rather than parsed purely for the purposes of a compiler/interpreter). However, I'm happy to be educated about this.

I come back to my example of Ant build files. With XML tools (XSLT, in my case), it's not hard to generate documentation of the flow of control for an Ant build. My question is how easy it is to use a scripting language parser (they are commonly built-in, according to Steven's reply) to do the same kind of analysis of a scripting language build script, perhaps of the sort used by SCons. Maybe it's easier than I imagine, but having written a build system in the past in a scripting language (NetRexx), I'm not convinced that it wouldn't be an order of magnitude harder. Mind you, that probably has as much to do with the discipline that Ant imposes, as it has to do with the ease of processing that comes with XML.

Has anyone else had experience with this kind of issue, wanting to be able to treat code and control files as data so that you can generate statistics, documentation, etc.?

openSUSE 10.2

Yesterday I downloaded openSUSE 10.2 (as SUSE Linux is now called), all 3.7G of it, and today I updated the SUSE 10.1 installation on my laptop to openSUSE 10.2. It all went smoothly, except for a minor hiccup around some piece of KDE documentation (I've had that hiccup before, so it may be particular to my setup). As I use Gnome primarily, I didn't worry, I don't think it will be a problem.

The most obvious change is that the 3 SUSE menus ("Applications", "Places", and "Desktop") have been replaced by a single "Computer" menu that drops down a large wide rectangular menu showing one of "Favourite Applications", "Recently Used Applications" or "Recent Documents". There is a "More Applications..." button to access the full set of applications. You can easily add or remove the applications listed as favourites. It also has a sidebar with "System" and "Status" entries.

I'll probably use the new "Favourite Applications" area to replace some of the panel (toolbar) icons I set up for the applications that I use the most.

Ubuntu 6.10 (EdgyEft) vs. SUSE 10.1 on an HP Pavilion dv2000 (dv2058ea)

Lee commented that the HP Pavilion dv2000 is well supported by Ubuntu/Kubuntu Linux 6.10 (aka EdgyEft). In particular, he mentioned that sound worked, and the extra row of blue-lit multimedia buttons at the top works. That sounded very interesting, so I decided to have a try. I use Gnome, not KDE, as my desktop, so I chose to look at Ubuntu, not Kubuntu (which Lee uses).

One very neat thing is that the Ubuntu installation CD is also a live distribution, so you can use it to test Ubuntu compatibility with your PC before actually installing it. This is what I did. I certainly also appreciated that the desktop version of Ubuntu fits on a single CD! By comparison, I'm currently downloading the installation image for openSUSE 10.2 (which I consequently haven't installed yet, but will in the near future). openSUSE 10.2 is a 3.7G download, and required 5-6 CDs or a DVD.

Ubuntu looks really neat when you start it up. SUSE isn't bad, but Ubuntu looks more polished. I can see why it is so popular. From the outset it makes you feel good about the choice that you have made.

As Lee reported, sound works. However, only the speakers work. The headphones don't work, and microphones don't work. This is the same as SUSE 10.1 with an ALSA patch, so I guess Ubuntu 6.10 has picked up this change (I hope openSUSE 10.2 will have it as well).

The volume up/down/mute buttons on the dv2000 certainly do work under Ubuntu, which is neat. They don't under SUSE 10.1. However, Ubuntu is unable to detect the built-in webcam, same as SUSE 10.1.

The software manager in Ubuntu looks cool, nicer than the one in SUSE (which hasn't changed since version 9). One neat thing is that it shows 1 to 5 stars to indicate the popularity of each package, which is useful for anyone who is looking for a particular kind of application but could use a bit of help in picking which of the alternatives to try (and I'm certainly sometimes in that boat myself).

On the other hand, the wireless LAN support in Ubuntu is weaker. You have to type in the wireless LAN keys in hex, like you do in Windows. SUSE 10.1 lets you type in the human-readable passphrase. SUSE 10.1 also has an applet that displays all of the available wireless LANs (up to 12 at my place). I couldn't find an equivalent in Ubuntu (and if there was one, it wouldn't have hurt to have it installed as a default).

I noticed that Ubuntu's nautilus (Gnome file manager) has a menu entry to allow you to submit translations of the nautilus menu entries (etc.) via the Web. That's a cool way to allow people to help with the effort of internationalising the software.

However, on balance, I'll be sticking with SUSE. Ubuntu looks nice, but there is no net advantage for me in switching. It does some things better than SUSE, some things worse. I can only hope the SUSE folks work out how to support the multimedia keys on the dv2000 …

XML is first class, scripting languages are second class

I've just been reading "XML - One Ring to Rule them All..." on Steven Lott's blog, and I completely disagree with his conclusion. I don't want to go through the whole thing point by point, but let me pick out a couple of things:

• I do get tired of people writing that XML is opaque and difficult to read or write. In my experience, the people who write such things have been trying to do XML using notepad, vi, or Emacs. There are plenty of good XML-aware editors around, some of which are free. If you choose to enslave yourself to a plain text editor (that is not XML-aware), in this day and age, it shouldn't come as a surprise that some things seem difficult to do.
• XML is actually brilliant for things like build systems, or indeed for programming languages (e.g. XSLT). Why? Well, I know some people complain (because they are using text editors), but anything written in XML is a first class piece of data. Textual scripting languages are at best second class data. For example, Apache Ant uses an XML build file (control file). The file defines particular build targets which are dependent on other build targets. At run-time, Ant decides what the correct order is for calling the targets. It isn't necessary completely obvious, with a big build, to see just what the call order of the targets will be (and this has nothing to do with it being XML, just that Ant uses a "callback" approach rather than a simplistic procedural approach). For a client, I wrote a sequence of XSLT stylesheets that examined the Ant call structure and then generated an HTML page showing the call sequence that you get for each target in the build. That was reasonably easy to do because the build file is XML. If it has been some arbitrary text format, it could have taken a lot longer, and may not have been a practical option. For all that XML may seem more difficult to read than a textual format, it is easier and simpler to parse, and there are many tools that can help you work with it (e.g. XSLT, XQuery). So if you turn a text format into XML, you change it from being a second class piece of data to being a first class piece of data. In large-scale, enterprise projects, it's really helpful to do that.

XML works well for representing a lot of the data we have to represent (i.e. anything that has a workable hierarchical representation). Editing XML in a plain text editor works badly for most things written in XML. Many discussions around the good and bad of XML seem to boil down to these two points.

From StarOffice to OpenOffice

I've been using StarOffice since before Sun bought it, since before there was an OpenOffice suite. I'm still grateful to Sun for having open-sourced StarOffice to make OpenOffice possible.

A lot of people switched to OpenOffice when it appeared, not the least because you have to pay for StarOffice while OpenOffice comes at no cost. For my part, I was happy to pay the cost of StarOffice, and in the early days of OpenOffice, I was happy not to have new versions to deal with too often.

However, times change, and I've decided to switch to Novell's version of OpenOffice 2.0.2 (the latest "standard" OpenOffice is 2.1). There are two reasons for choosing the Novell version. One is that I run SUSE Linux on my systems, so the Novell version is what I get by default with that distribution. However, I'm also running the Novell version for Windows, and that brings me to the other reason, Novell's enhanced support for Microsoft Office documents.

I know Novell has come under a lot of criticism for its recent agreement with Microsoft, and I'm sure I don't fully understand all of its ramifications. However, one thing that I definitely like is Novell's commitment to enhance OpenOffice's ability to work with the Microsoft Office document formats.

Primarily, my interest is interoperability. So, while I use OpenOffice's native OpenDocument format a lot, I also have to use the Microsoft Office formats because many people, including my partners, use Microsoft Office and its document formats. Some people are forced to use to Microsoft Office, but many are very happy users of it, and that isn't going to change quickly. Support for Micrsoft Office formats will be important for quite a while yet. StarOffice/OpenOffice has always done a reasonable job of opening Microsoft Office documents, but tables and text boxes have often caused me problems, so there has definitely been room for improvement.

Let me add that I think it is just as great that an OpenDocument (ODF) importer/exporter add-in for Microsoft Office is being produced. For OpenOffice users and Microsoft Office users to be able to read and write both formats easily will be great, that is what interoperability is all about.

I remember attending a briefing, some years ago now, when Borland introduced its developer tools for Linux. At the time, I was working as a Java developer. I talked to a number of the attendees who were more involved with Linux that I was then, and I was taken aback by their attitude to interoperability. In particular, they thought cross-platform development environments like Java were a waste of time, because the solution was just to run Linux everywhere. That isn't interoperability. That's the same kind of maniacal empire building strategy that Microsoft has so often been accused of. It was frustrating for me to realise in that moment that the Linux bigots were every bit as myopic as the Windows bigots.

Not me, I like interoperability, being able to achieve the same thing across multiple systems, giving users some choices as to which hardware and software they can use to get the job done. So I applaud Novell for helping the cause of interoperability, at a time when I know they are getting bad press for other aspects of their deal with Microsoft.

UBL 2.0 is now an OASIS standard

UBL 2.0 (Universal Business Language) is now an OASIS standard. To quote the press release: UBL defines a royalty-free library of standard, electronic XML business documents such as purchase orders and invoices. UBL formats in electronic messages enable direct connection into existing business, legal, auditing, and records management practices, eliminating the re-keying of data in existing fax- and paper-based supply chains and providing an entry point into electronic commerce for small- and medium-sized businesses.

Denmark in particular has taken to UBL. The government there has been using it since version 0.7, and expects to save hundreds of millions of US dollars from managing its invoices electronically. See Mikkel Brun's XML 2006 presentation for more about this (note that the presentation and/or slides haven't been posted yet - but they should be soon).

My own contribution to UBL has been rather small - I joined a couple of years ago as I lobbied various groups to converge on a single approach to code lists. UBL 2.0 makes use of the draft genericode format that I created, and the OASIS Code List Representation TC is now working towards creating an approved 1.0 version of genericode (to be followed version 2.0, with 3.0 under discussion). Crane Softwrights already have some free tools to help people working with genericode, and they are also training people in how to use them (as part of their UBL training course).

A lot of people have put in a lot of work for UBL, and I'm glad to see UBL 2.0 make it to the status of OASIS standard. There's a lot more money that can be saved (even within Denmark, let alone in the entire rest of the world) by putting it to good use.

What's the biggest cash crop in the US?

Via The Register, apparently marijuana is now the biggest cash crop in the US, worth more than corn, soybeans, or hay. I remember that on my first visit to the US, in 1993, I was told that George Washington used to smoke marijuana. By all accounts, it wasn't made illegal until around the time that someone developed a "hemp gin" (a machine, not a drink) that potentially could make hemp fabric as cheaply as a cotton gin could make cotton fabric. Hemp lasts something like 10 times longer than cotton, and I seem to remember that the original Levi's jeans were made from hemp for that reason. The suggestion is that the cotton barons used their political influence at that stage to have hemp/marijuana outlawed.

I'm not in favour of legalising marijuana, in particular because we don't have a way to test whether drivers are "under the influence" of it or not. I do think hemp is a good fabric, though. There are people developing varieties of hemp that are good for fabric but not for smoking, but I think we can assume this isn't the variety that is currently being grown across the US.

XML 2006 Proceedings

Two week ago, I was in Boston at the XML 2006 conference. I enjoyed it. It may have been slightly smaller than previous years, and while many familiar faces weren't there, there were quite a few new and interesting faces to take their places.

Many of the XML 2006 conference slides are now available. More will be added as the speakers supply them. Unlike previous years, speakers this year only had to produce slides, rather than also produce a separate conference paper.

Of the talks that I saw, the ones that were most interesting for me personally were:

• Getting There — The XML/XQuery Ecosystem
• XQueryP: An XML Application Development Language
• XML streaming: XML trees and XML querys – Can they co-exist in harmony?
• From 18 to 100 million UBL messages with a Service Oriented Architecture
• Ontology-Based XML Schemas for Interoperability between Systems and Tools
• Meta-stylesheets
• Managing Complex Relationships in Oracle XML DB
• SQL, XQuery, and SPARQL: Making the Picture Prettier
• Relational database integration with RDF/OWL
• Making HL7 Version 3 messages easier to use

Unfortunately, many of these do not have the slides available yet. Check back later though; they should appear over the next few weeks. The slides are available for the panel session that I spoke in, on Agile XML Development.

If you couldn't make it this year, I hope you'll have to chance to attend next year. XML 2007 will also be in Boston in early December. See you there!

Robo-dog

Via Jalopnik, this video of a 4-legged walking robot is pretty amazing. Especially when they kick it and it doesn't lose its balance. It has an amazingly natural walking gait. Have a look for yourself.